A miller’s son from Transylvania
George Mantello was born György Mandl on December 11, 1901, in Lekence, a village in Transylvania that then belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary and is today Lechința in Romania. His parents, Baruch Yehudah Mandl and Ida Spitz, were Orthodox Jews; according to the historian David Kranzler, his paternal grandfather had been a rabbi and his father owned a mill, which made the family comfortably well-to-do by the standards of the region. György grew up with three sisters and two brothers, one of whom, Josef, would later stand beside him in his rescue work.
His childhood world was redrawn by war. After 1918 Transylvania passed from Hungary to Romania, and in 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, Hungary took the northern part back again. Families like the Mandls, Hungarian-speaking Jews in a contested borderland, learned early that citizenship was something governments could grant, revoke and rewrite at will. It was a lesson Mandl would one day turn into a weapon.
A businessman between borders
As a young man Mandl went into trade and became a textile manufacturer, working in Bucharest and moving between Romania and Hungary; by the 1930s, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, he was living in Budapest with his wife and son. He was energetic, well connected and comfortable in several languages and several countries, qualities that made him a successful businessman and would later make him an unusually effective rescuer.
In the 1930s he met and befriended José Arturo Castellanos, a Salvadoran army colonel turned diplomat who served as El Salvador’s consul general in Liverpool, Hamburg and, from 1942, Geneva. The friendship between a Transylvanian Jewish merchant and a Central American officer seemed, at first, no more than a pleasant business acquaintance. When Hungary, allied to Nazi Germany, tightened its anti-Jewish laws, it became a lifeline.
A title, a name, and a refuge
In 1942 Castellanos brought Mandl to neutral Switzerland and gave him the post of First Secretary at the Salvadoran consulate general in Geneva. Historians at the Holocaust Memorial Museum describe it as a creatively invented title; it gave Mandl diplomatic standing and papers for himself and his family. It was at this point that he began to use the name Mantello, which sounded more Latin and better suited to a Salvadoran official. He would later be known as George Mandel-Mantello.
Mantello, who was himself a Jewish refugee in all but name, did not treat his new position as a private escape. According to the museum’s account, when a group of Jews approached him for money to buy Latin American papers on the black market, he was offended less by the request than by the idea that people were profiting from Jewish desperation. His answer was to cut out the middlemen altogether.
Citizenship on paper
With Castellanos’s consent, given against the wishes of the government in San Salvador, which had refused the consul’s earlier pleas to help Jews, Mantello began issuing certificates declaring that the bearer was a citizen of El Salvador, entitled to that country’s rights and protection. The documents were typed on official letterhead, usually in French, and covered in every stamp and seal the consulate possessed. They did not offer a way out of Europe. Instead they offered shelter on paper: a German or Hungarian official confronted with a citizen of a neutral Latin American state had to think twice before deporting the holder, and holders could claim the attention of neutral diplomats and the Red Cross.
Mantello, his assistant Mathieu Muller and a team of Swiss university students worked the typewriters; the team grew from five to about a dozen during the Hungarian crisis of 1944. Copies went out by diplomatic pouch, by ordinary Swiss mail and by underground couriers. Accounts agree that Mantello charged nothing and covered the costs himself. When a certificate arrived too late for the person named on it, it was often passed to someone else, the photograph swapped.
How many were issued is uncertain. The Holocaust Memorial Museum, which holds more than a thousand surviving originals donated by Mantello’s son Enrico, estimates that he may have issued as many as five thousand certificates, many of them covering several members of a family; other accounts give considerably higher figures, and the number of people protected is usually reckoned in the thousands or tens of thousands. The museum’s research into one country gives a sense of their power: close to half of Belgium’s Jews were murdered, but some ninety percent of Mantello certificate holders there survived.
The report from Auschwitz
On March 19, 1944, Germany occupied Hungary, and within weeks the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began, at a rate of roughly twelve thousand people a day. Mantello’s own parents and relatives lived in the Transylvanian town of Bistrița. He sent a Romanian diplomat, Florian Manoliu, to bring them Salvadoran papers. Manoliu was delayed by German questioning at the border and arrived two days after the town’s Jews had been deported to Auschwitz. Most of the family were killed.
Manoliu went on to Budapest, where he delivered papers to Mantello’s wife, and where, with the help of the Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz and the Zionist official Moshe Krausz, he obtained a set of documents. Among them was a condensed version of the testimony of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two young Slovak Jews who had escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944 and described its gas chambers in precise detail, along with a further report on the ghettoisation and deportation of some 435,000 Hungarian Jews. Manoliu reached Mantello in Geneva in the early hours of June 21, 1944.
Switzerland’s finest hour
Mantello did not wait for the established Jewish organisations in Switzerland to decide what to do. Working through the night, he summarised the reports, had them translated and copied, and put them into the hands of Swiss clergymen, politicians, academics, foreign diplomats and journalists. Pastor Paul Vogt of Zurich became a crucial ally, and the Zurich correspondent of the London-based Exchange Telegraph agency, Walter Garrett, helped carry the story abroad. Despite Swiss wartime press restrictions, a wave of coverage began in late June: hundreds of articles in Swiss newspapers, public meetings, church sermons and street protests demanding that the deportations stop. The reports soon reached newspapers in Britain and the United States.
Vogt turned the material into a booklet whose title asked, Soll ich meines Bruders Hüter sein?, Am I my brother’s keeper?, and it became a bestseller. In London, Winston Churchill wrote to his foreign secretary on July 11, 1944, that the persecution of Hungary’s Jews was probably ‘the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.’
The international pressure, from the press, from churches, from neutral governments, from Pope Pius XII, from the King of Sweden and from Roosevelt and Churchill, fell on Hungary’s regent, Miklós Horthy. On July 7 he ordered the deportations halted, and they largely stopped by July 9. Historians weigh the causes differently, and the Allied advance and Horthy’s own calculations played their part, but Mantello’s campaign is widely credited as a major factor. The pause kept alive the Jews of Budapest, where Raoul Wallenberg arrived on July 9 and where Carl Lutz and others went on issuing protective papers. Kranzler, his principal biographer, titled his 2000 book The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz.
A Jew who rescued Jews
Mantello’s story is a reminder, as the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s historians put it, that Jews were not only victims during the Holocaust but also actors, organisers and rescuers in their own right. He acted from a position that was itself precarious: a Transylvanian Jew whose diplomatic standing rested on a friend’s goodwill, whose home country was allied to Hitler, and whose own family was trapped in the Nazi sphere. He bypassed official caution, including that of established Jewish bodies in Switzerland, and he paid personally for much of the work.
Because he was Jewish, Mantello could not be named Righteous Among the Nations, the title Yad Vashem reserves for non-Jewish rescuers. His partner Castellanos, who had kept quiet about the rescue for the rest of his life, was posthumously recognised with that title in 2010, the first Salvadoran so honoured. For decades Mantello’s own role was little known outside specialist circles.
The partner in San Salvador’s name
Mantello’s rescue would have been impossible without José Arturo Castellanos Contreras, born in San Vicente, El Salvador, in 1893, who spent more than twenty-five years in the Salvadoran army, rising to second chief of its general staff, before serving as consul general in Liverpool, Hamburg and finally Geneva from 1942 to 1945. In 1939 he had written to his foreign minister warning of what was happening to Europe’s Jews and asking for permission to issue more visas; he was refused. By allowing the certificate operation to run through his consulate, he risked his career.
After the war Castellanos said almost nothing about what he had done; his daughter learned of it from the media in 1974. The novelist Leon Uris tracked him down in 1972, and he gave a brief radio interview in 1976, but he died in 1977 largely unrecognised. Jerusalem later named a street for El Salvador in his honour, and Yad Vashem’s recognition in 2010 finally placed the two partners’ story on the record together.
Later years and recognition
After the war Mantello settled in Italy and lived quietly in Rome. Recognition came late. Through the efforts of Kranzler and of Yeshiva University’s chancellor Norman Lamm, he received an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University in New York. He died in Rome on April 25, 1992, at the age of ninety, and was buried in the Har HaMenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem; The New York Times marked his death with an obituary.
His papers had a remarkable afterlife. Copies of thousands of certificates, kept for decades in a suitcase belonging to his late lawyer, were returned to his son Enrico Mandel-Mantello, who donated them, together with a copy of the Auschwitz report, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum so that they could be studied and seen. They stand as evidence of what one determined person, a sympathetic consul and a typewriter could do, and of how a single report, placed in the right hands at the right moment, could make it impossible for the world to say that it did not know.
Sources & further reading
George Mantello, Wikipedia · Thousands of False Identities (12 Years That Shook the World podcast), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum · George Mandel-Mantello, International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation · José Castellanos Contreras, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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